Trouserpress

I was in a café in Kyoto yesterday, getting lunch when a trivial incident revealed the profound ramifications of the smallest of our actions, and caused me a minor loss of life.

I ordered my sandwiches and my iced tea at the register, and waited in line at the counter for the young man working there to make my food.

There was a woman ahead of me in the line, very respectable looking in a boring sort of way, and somewhat dour in a dour sort of way.

Her sandwich when it was served turned out to be a huge sausage in lettuce on a bun. Oh, good, I thought, my food will be next. I was against the clock and very hungry, both.

However, my sandwiches — a prosciutto  with parmesan cheese and a spicy chicken — were not next.

The woman was squinting at the lettuce in her sandwich.

Suddenly, she was pointing out to the staff a blemish on the lettuce leaf that rose rather majestic and sail-like from her sausage sandwich. She had to point  out the blemish very carefully because it was so slight as to be almost invisible. It was a slightly brownish hue, possibly a bit of a bruise, and about the size of a finger print. This, as I say, on a large, fresh and crunchy looking leaf.

Instead of calling the lady a daft hag, and telling her not to be such a fuss pot, the lad behind the counter apologised and bowed abjectly for attempting to poison her with a semi-invisible stain and discreetly tossed the sandwich in the bin. In between fixing drinks for other customers he began making her a new sandwich from scratch.

The line was growing behind me. I was still against the clock. I was still hungry.

The lady shamelessly folded her arms and stared defiantly at the sandwich lad, unaware or uncaring of the havoc she was wreaking on the universe.

You see, there was a lot going on now. A little dimple, a minor black hole had appeared locally in the fabric of space.

First into this black hole was this needless waste of human life. The sandwich maker was spending time, valuable life time that he can never recover making a sandwich he had made perfectly well once already. How long did this take? He was very fast, but with interruptions, lets call it 3 minutes. That’s also three minutes of the fussy lady’s time as she waits to be served a sandwich that has already been served her. That’s three minutes of my life and of the lives of the four people waiting behind me. That’s 21 minutes of human life time spent to no useful purpose by a woman who has an aversion to merely nearly pristine lettuce.

Next into the black hole was the death of the pig. Yes, a pig died to make that sausage — not only that sausage, I grant you, but a living, breathing animal was slaughtered to make sausages and chops and bacon and prosciutto for us. I’ll bet you the pig did not want to be slaughtered, and died very much protesting and struggling to stay alive. I eat meat, but I never forget where it comes from. If a living creature has its life taken to make food for us, we should treat  that food with respect. Throwing away that sausage was great disrespect to the pig.  The selfish act of discarding the sausage  devalued the life and sacrifice of that intelligent beast.

The clock was ticking. I had to get two sandwiches down me and get myself back to work so that I could my duty of earning the money to feed my three children and keep the company president in cigarettes and golf clubs. This was causing me stress, which is also a known killer. How many future heartbeats was this prima donna of lettuce costing me? What about the people in the line behind me? What plans and commitments were falling apart for them? What biological depredations were they suffering?

And we have only so far discussed the waste of life. What about the impact this act had on the environment? That food was transported from one place to another in big smoky lorries, it was processed on machines that guzzled energy and gave out more fumes, thus contributing to global warming and resource wars. People were dying around the world over the price of oil or scratching the earth with sticks to find water that has been diverted by agricultural combos. All that too was being sucked into this dimple in the fabric of the universe.

I did the only thing I could under the circumstances. Call me mad and impulsive, but I waited mutely in line with everyone else. I regarded the woman impassively, but no amount of impassiveness brought about any apology, acknowledgement or sudden epiphany. She just puffed herself up and crossed her arms and adopted a pre-emptively defiant mien.

I wanted to hand her a spread sheet, an audit of the situation; the time, the money the natural resources. But I didn’t. I waited and I silently cursed her further for the time I knew I would have to spend writing this blog post.

[This actually happened in July 2006, but I was distracted before I could finish it and post it. I came across it recently while rummaging in my files.]

I have been neglecting Trouserpress lately, mostly because I have been extremely drunk and missing drugs (just my way of getting through Xmas). This evening I thought I would drop in for a bit of maintenance and found that there were 300 comments waiting for moderation. Of course, when we say comments, what we really mean is spam. This weight of spam has rendered the moderation page unworkable. There should be a button at the bottom of the page that will eliminate all the unwanted comments/spam in one go, but there is so much, the page will not render properly and the casualty is the zap button. This means I have to go through eliminating them one at a time and waiting for the page to re-build itself with each single deletion. This means that spammers, apart from being complete toerags, are murderers, because this is life time, a part of my life I will not get back.

The spam is for erection drugs (just use a pencil, dammit) and porn sites (if you can’t get a woody, what do you need the porn for?). The title of this post came from one bit of spam, the original spelling preserved intact. Why fuk in hospitals? I don’t get it. Is it because of all the beds there? But why do you need so many beds? How many beds can one couple fuk in? I have never in my life needed more than one bed at a time and in fact I have found sofas, floors, cars and even the great outdoors to be perfectly adequate substitutes when a bed was not available.

Another ad read ‘after amateur sex’ and carried a link to some kind of porn site. I thought, what after amateur sex? A good cuddle and ten minutes of contented chat before dozing off? It didn’t immediately dawn on me that they meant after as in seeking, and the absence of a question mark threw me. Really, these people have serious issues with spelling and grammar.

And what is it with this amateur sex thing? People having normal sex, presumably, perhaps in frowsy flannel night clothes with the light of? I thought the whole point of the sex business was exactly that it was professional, that people pay large amounts of money to do ridiculous things to each other and no obligation to make small talk. Wow! Look at that! Did you see they way they didn’t pay each other. Pass the tissues!

I am not sure what I hate more about this spam stuff, the waste of time or the logical and syntactical idiocies it imposes on me. Well, got to get back to fixing the moderation page thing so that you can comment on this post.